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Chris Westfall is the US National Elevator Pitch Champion, and his strategies have created multi-million dollar results for entrepreneurial companies on four continents. His clients have appeared on Shark Tank, Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank-Australia. He’s the publisher of seven books, including The NEW Elevator Pitch and BulletProof Branding. Chris also teaches his business building strategies in a variety of workshops and online courses.

Takeaway quote:

“You know what people are thinking about. Why not start the conversation there?”

Show Timeline

1:03 Chris’s story
How he came to be the national elevator pitch champion
4:36 The question advisors need to be able to answer
Why designations are not enough, and what prospects want to know most
5:33 Traditional elevator pitch vs. ‘the new elevator pitch’
Changing from a sales conversation to a dialogue
8:24 Critical components of the dialogue with prospects
‘You’ language, and the call to action
11:49 The traps in which even seasoned advisors can fall
Starting where you are, as opposed to where the client is
14:27 An outline of the process laid out in Chris’s book
Using CLARITY as a 7-step guide to creating your pitch
17:03 Conversation starters and their impact
How to have a conversation about what you do that sparks the interest of your listener
26:20 Making this strategy work for different personality types
Speaking with engineers, etc. and what we all have in common
29:27 Tailoring the pitch for centers of influence
Considering what’s in it for that person to send clients to you
31:33 Becoming more referable using the new elevator pitch
Teaching people how to buy
34:16 The relevance of the new elevator pitch in the current environment
Importance of context over content
37:27 How to get started on this path today
Practicing the conversation with your team and with clients’ priorities in mind

Links

Website: http://westfallonline.com
YouTube: http://youtube.com/westfallonline
Book: The NEW Elevator Pitch
The 118 Pitch course: https://www.udemy.com/118-pitch-course/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/westfallonline
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/westfallonline/

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

Steve Wershing:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to be the kind of advisor people want to talk about. I’m Steve Wershing. In this episode, we talk with Chris Westfall, National Elevator Pitch Champion and author of the book The New Elevator Pitch. In our conversation, we talk about the idea that although our industry has sort of gotten past the idea of a pitch, that the idea of an elevator pitch, which is to be persuasive in a very short period of time is more important than ever. We’ll talk about how you can’t judge the effectiveness of an elevator pitch based on what you say, but rather on what people do once they hear it. Chris will cover will some of his surefire conversation openers to help you get into discussions about what you do. It’s a great episode with a lot of practical ideas. Now, Chris Westfall. Well, Chris Westfall, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. We’re so happy to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Chris Westfall:

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Steve Wershing:

One of the things that’s interesting about your background is that you are the national elevator pitch champion. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and what the whole competition is about?

Chris Westfall:

Well, it all started with a Tweet, which is kind of strange to say that because I have about 13,000 followers on Twitter. My Twitter stream is pretty busy, but I saw a Tweet somehow that there was an interest in finding out who had the best two-minute speech in the country. It was put together by a gentleman named Jeffrey Hazlet, and that name may be familiar to some folks.

Steve Wershing:

Sure.

Chris Westfall:

He was on Bloomberg TV and he’s written a few bestselling books. He put together this contest to see who had the most compelling and persuasive two-minute speech. I thought to myself, why not? Why not check it out? I had been doing coaching and working with clients and helping them on a number of different things, including their elevator pitch. I said, I’m just going to try. I went and I recorded a two-minute video and submitted it to this competition. I had to get votes from all over the country. It was a contest where you solicited votes via social media to watch the video. Actually, I came in second place in the national voting. Second place.

Steve Wershing:

Wow.

Chris Westfall:

Yeah. An entrepreneur in Atlanta actually got the most votes. I thought, well, this was a great experience. I’m really glad that I did it, but then my phone rang and it was one of Jeff’s team letting me know that I was the grand prize winner and the national champion. They had done a Voice-American Idol kind of thing and they said, second place in the voting, but first place with us.

Steve Wershing:

Interesting.

Chris Westfall:

Then, everything changed. That was how that recognition came to be, and that was what launched the books and really transformed the work that I was doing to help me to engage with financial advisors, Fortune 100 companies, etc.

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